Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").

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Like my brownhouse:
   excavating really big pieces from bedrock
Monday, November 8 2010
For whatever reason, I have become re-obsessed with excavating the greenhouse well hole, which is quickly becoming a subterranean cistern. I love the straightforward nature of digging, and when working with cracked shale, digging into it has much of the charm of excavating into an enormous ledge of LegoTM. There's also a lottery-playing aspect to it: one never knows how big of a piece one is about to dislodge. I find breaking loose enormous sticks of rock very satisfying but also a little frightening; sometimes a piece is so big that it intrudes into a part of the hole wall I'd assumed I'd be leaving in place. And of course sometimes big pieces are difficult to maneuver out of the hole. One especially large slab I removed this morning was too heavy to lift, indicating it probably weighed more than 200 pounds. I somehow managed to tilt it end over end out the door and into the grass outside, where I left it to lie beside other large pieces for which I will hopefully find suitably-grand uses.


The biggest piece I extracted from the greenhouse well hole today. I wear a size-12 Croc. This piece, like most other large ones, is actually from a layer of bluestone, not shale. The two stone types alternate somewhat in the strata beneath the greenhouse floor.


The interior of the greenhouse and well hole as they looked in the middle of the afternoon today.


The place where I've been disposing of the rock removed from the greenhouse floor. We're looking east from the hillside west of the greenhouse.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?101108

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